


Bird

by hellsyeah



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Grand Theft Auto Setting, Blood and Injury, Fake AH Crew, Female Jack, Gen, M/M, Name Changes, They go by nicknames, Trans Female Character, Violence, ambiguous character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 06:53:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7704706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellsyeah/pseuds/hellsyeah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alba has her crew and her crew is family. The drunk boss, the snarky sniper, and the murdering muscle.<br/>When someone threatens her family, she gets deadly.</p>
<p>AU where they don't go by their actual names, even to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bird

**Author's Note:**

> Alba - Jack  
> Hoss - Geoff  
> Trip - Ray  
> Kai - Ryan  
> Kaiho is the Finnish word for Hopeless Longing/Yearning.

“When I said I was going to pick you up, I hoped you wouldn’t be standing on the fucking building as it exploded!” Alba says. The earpiece crackling with the sound of Kai’s laughter and Hoss’s constant annoyed grumbling.  
“You never said I couldn’t be,” Kai says. “Plus, we still have a good minute before it goes up.”  
Alba is tempted to just leave him there and let him find his own way out but that would end with Hoss cutting her pay. She angles the helicopter back toward the building, ignoring the black dots she can see in the distance; more helicopters and not the friendly ones. She can hear the echo of bullets now. And a ting. Some idiot shooting at the chopper. The bullets will just bounce off of the armored side of the military grade helicopter and right through his eye socket, at least that's what she hopes will happen. Nothing like getting hit with your own bullet out of pure stupidity.  
Kai is standing at the edge of the building by the time she gets into range, his face paint dripping onto his shirt, looking more like the remnants of a happy child with a popsicle than a man who just shot up an entire building. His left arm is clutched by his side, "I'm gonna need you to get lower than that. Got a Band-Aid on my arm."  
"If this blows and takes out my chopper you better hope we both die."  
"Neither of you are dying," Hoss says. "Kai has the fucking money."  
"Do I?" Kai says. Alba can't see him from the cockpit anymore, too close to the building, but she can imagine that he is smirking and tugging on the strap of the book bag on his back. She drops low enough for him to open the door to the cockpit and tug himself in, nearly slipping and having to slam his injured arm on the seat and roll onto the floor.  
Alba turns the helicopter with a hard left when she hears a hollow thump, "I thought you said we had a minute."  
"We did." Kai hoists himself up enough to watch the building start to crumble.

Being the only woman in a gang felt the same way the last pickle in the jar felt, lonely but swimming in the bitter that keeps you alive. And sometimes it feels like you’ve definitely drank too much cheap beer and have been staring at the open fridge for too long.  
She is on a crew with men that the news considered cold-blooded and heartless. But she knows them. These are men who buy enough bullets to outfit an army without blinking. Can blow up an entire building. And yet, as soon as her estrogen pills are on the list of supplies they turn into squealing pigs, like she's asked them to use them, too. Except Hoss, he'll calmly ask "what brand?" and send one of the others to get them, like it pained him to do it himself. Hoss was a man who used to drink to forget but he forgot, and now he drinks to remember.  
Hoss found her when she was a dumb kid stealing cigarettes and sandwiches from gas stations and told her that she’d never have to live on the streets again, as long as she could drive a car. He gave her her first helicopter. He never asked her name, but she earned it. Albatross. She’s been by his side for over a decade now.  
Trip came along about three years later, nothing more than a fourteen- year -old fleeing his home for something better. He’s been sending his mom a monthly check of several thousand dollars a month for years now. He left to avoid being killed for money after getting caught up in the drug cartel and lost some of the drugs he was selling. He calls his life ‘ironic’ but shows no signs of guilt.  
Kaiho came along last and when he showed up at the door Hoss slammed it in his face. Kai already had a reputation and Hoss wanted to make sure he lived up to it. When one of Hoss’s warehouses blew up a few hours later he went out to find Kai and bring him home. Kai enjoys torture and donating most of his money to every animal shelter in the city.  
The new kid had only been around for a month. He hasn’t earned his name yet. Hoss seems to think he has potential, and from what they’ve seen, he has a way with security cameras, but so does every other hacker in the business.  
A jean-clad pair of legs walks into view and she looks up just as Kai grabs a Diet Coke from the top shelf.  
“Should I close the door or are you enjoying the breeze?” Kai says. He holds out a hand and Alba grabs it so he can hoist her up off the floor.  
"I'm avoiding work."  
"She's drunk!" Newbie says. Kid was sitting in the living room, apparently, must have shown up after she slunk to the floor.  
"Not gonna get brownie points from Hoss by being a tattle tale, Newbie," Kai says.  
"I'm not being a-"  
"Shouldn't you be cleaning the weapons before Hoss gets back in?” Trip says. He’s walking out from the direction of the bathroom when she looks over at him.  
Alba watches as the new guy stalks off down the hallway and trips forward as Kai pushes her toward the living room of the large condo. Trip drops down on the cushion beside her and leans against her side, tossing one of Kai’s pocket knives in the air. Kai remains standing watching it rise and fall.  
Her painted partner in crime, literally. Kai and Alba spend the most time together. It started because Hoss didn’t trust Kai with any of his personal jobs and sent Alba to watch over the vagabond who stands over a foot taller than her. From the first job they just seemed to work perfectly together, his brash bloodlust and her smooth intimidation kept people at bay on any type of job. That then evolved into what it is now, an almost sibling bond involving murder and pizza bites.  
And Trip. She runs her fingers through the dark hair on Trip’s head, thinking about how he should be in college right now. Drinking to excess and stealing the hearts of all the pretty college girls with his thick accent and long lashes. But instead he sits here, fingers stained black and red, leg bandaged from a bullet hole, and tossing a knife that’s been slicing people open for about as long as he’s been alive.  
When Hoss come’s in it is never quiet, he throws down the duffle bag on his shoulder and grabs the closest bottle of alcohol he can find.  
“Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to schedule a meeting in the middle of the day?” Hoss says. No one tells him it was his idea. He walks by the couch, patting Kai on the back and dropping into a worn arm chair.  
“What’s the word, boss man?” Trip says.  
“We need to meet with the CEO of boring-town about his partner’s election campaign or something. So, I’m taking Trip.”  
“You’re meeting about money and you’re not taking Kai? What kind of intimidation are you trying to pull?” Alba asks.  
“I don’t think intimidation is the thing he wants right now. This is a money deal, so taking the little one looks more unassuming,” Kai says.  
“Hey!” Trip misses catching the knife in favor of reaching his arm up to smack at Kai.  
“He’s right. We’ll be going out later tonight.” Hoss says. “Has the new kid cleaned the pistols?”

Hours later, Alba’s sober, the new kid is napping on the chair, and Trip and Hoss are preparing to go. Kai’s sitting on the floor in front of Trip and checking the wrapping on his wound. Another week and he should be back to jumping across buildings. Kai pats his knee before he stands up and walks back through the condo. Hoss walks over to stand beside Alba, dropping his arm around her shoulder.  
“You know the rules, three hours without contact come looking for us,” Hoss says.  
“And bring a duffle full of cash in case all they want is the money, I know. Now get out of here and bring me back more power.”  
“You already run this city, little bird. You don’t need us for that.”

Two and a half hours into the meeting Trip is still sending everyone emoji’s and memes.  
Four hours in and Hoss has started sending his own.  
Five hours in and neither of them are sending anything.  
Seven hours after they left and Kai is starting to pace the floor.  
Eight hours in and Alba has her gun tucked into the back of her jeans and a duffle in the back seat of her car. Kai is leaving on his motorcycle in order to drive through alleys and Newbie is left at home to keep an eye on security and traffic cameras.  
Exactly three hours after the last text was sent Alba is standing outside the building where her boss was supposed to meet his newest business partner at, staring down at a dropped phone. She picks it up off the ground and unlocks it, the same lock that has always been used, 0420, because Trip thinks he’s hilarious, opening his messages and calling Kai.  
“Where the fu-“  
“Kai. They’re gone.”

The procedure when someone gets taken is to sit and wait for a hint.  
“How could they have gotten taken? Isn’t Trip great at hand-to-hand? How could someone get the upper hand on Hoss?” Newbie asks, not looking up from his computer screen.  
“Trip’s got a hole in his leg and Hoss is sober,” Alba says. She’s sitting at the kitchen table going over maps of the city and looking for places people can hide operations or bodies. No one was going to kill Hoss, not the man who owned the city and could have them picked off slowly, even after death. But Trip, to most of the city and the rival crews he was a threat with a sniper but nothing but a child with a DS without it, if they felt he didn’t matter…  
Kai won’t stop pacing through the living room, tossing his throwing knives and leaving them embedded in the walls. Alba learned a long time ago not to question where those knives come from. She knows he has to be thinking the same things she is. His face paint is sloppily put on, the black around his eyes inconsistent and the red down his cheeks smeared, his fingers stained with paint for the first time in a long time. His hands aren’t as steady as the ones who usually doll him up.  
“I think I’ve got something,” Newbie says and Alba thinks that maybe the kid can be of use after all. She walks over and leans over his shoulder, eyes flicking over the screen. Kai doesn’t leave the living room but he stops pacing. Newbie enlarges one of the screens, an old warehouse, the yard littered with old airplane parts. “There’s new tracks outside and a truck parked out back.”  
“That warehouse is the furthest one from any of our outposts.” Kai says. Alba looks up and watches as he walks off down the hallway to the weapons closet. They’re going. It’s decided even before Newbie tells them the coordinates.  
Alba walks halfway down the hall and catches the sniper rifle that Kai tosses her way, turning and tossing it back at Newbie who almost loses grip on it. “We’re going to need eyes on the outside and without Trip you’re all we got.”

Getting moving doesn’t take nearly as long when they’re motivated by more than money. Alba’s hands are shaking as she pilots the helicopter to a readied destination where a getaway car was brought by a close-by grunt of Hoss’s. She lands the helicopter in the field and manages to not fling Newbie out of the side. She tucks extra ammo into her jacket and another pistol is tied to her thigh. She looks up at Kai and nods, the two of them rounding the copter and climbing into the car. If this were any other job, Kai would be pointing out that they look like twins, hair slicked back on their heads and murderous look in their eyes, but now their only thoughts were on a purple hooded sniper and their moustache-clad leader.  
The warehouse was about a five-minute drive from the helicopter, but that was if you were following traffic laws. Alba cut through fields and sped too much around corners, stopping behind trees as soon as the warehouse was in view. She got out of the car and pointed to a nearby divot in the ground.  
“Newbie, I want you here, watching for anyone that leaves that building. Got it?” She says.  
He nods and pats the extra ammo bag on his side. “I got it.”  
“I mean it, leave no one alive.”  
“Good, the kid has it. Let’s go,” Kai says. He’s already walking through the trees to find a good entrance angle and Alba hurries to catch up, casting one last glance at where they left the new kid.  
She presses her finger to the mic in her ear. “Tell me you can hear me.”  
“I got you,” Kai says.  
“Loud and clear, Alba,” Newbie says.  
Satisfied she nods and follows behind Kai as he makes his way out of the woods and presses his back against the old shell of an airplane. She wonders just how long it will be until there’s movement when the first shot is fired.  
They’ve got the right place. They have to by the way as soon as the first guy goes down more pool out into the dirt, all looking for the place the bullet came from. Alba glances in the general direction of Newbie and is glad to see that he’s not visible. Kai taps her arm and she looks back at him, reaching up to place her hand over his arm where she knows there’s still a fresh bullet wound, he nods at her and gives the faintest smile before he ducks around the plane and is out of her sight.  
Pistol rounds are firing from her left side, and she’d be worried more about Kai if she wasn’t about to be in his same position. She counts to ten, standard for splitting up in a gun fight, and ducks around the opposite side Kai went. She fires her gun at the first people she sees, taking down one before the group even turns around to see she’s there. She thinks she sees Kai’s blond hair for a moment, but he’s gone before she can be sure.  
She takes down two more of the men as she darts for the nearest cover. Bullets bounce off the old metal, and she hears one man swear, a smirk momentarily finding its way onto her face. Shot by your team’s’ bullet. She tugs a grenade out of the inside of her coat, waiting a few seconds before she tosses it backwards over her cover and runs the opposite direction. The explosion throws her off balance for a second, but she’s back on her feet and shooting at the other people before they can get themselves back together. Six shots, six bodies. She drops the magazine before quickly clicking in a new long magazine as she runs toward the building. Kai wouldn’t go inside until everyone outside was dead but Alba couldn’t waste that time. She knew he trusted her to find their family within the walls of the warehouse and with the added ruckus whoever had them had even more reason to kill them.  
She is surprised at the brightness of the inside, she’d thought that the place might have been forgotten to the point even the lights were disgusting but the whole place had the glow of a hospital. She shoots down a guard in the hallway. She smiles when she sees the familiar sight of a woman rounding a corner and makes sure to shoot her in the head. Sisterhood calls for quicker deaths.  
Alba ducks into the first room she comes across, the whole thing lined with computers and for a second she thinks about leaving the person still sitting at one alive but decides against it once she sees he’s watching security footage. She leaves the room again and has to immediately duck out of the way of a rifle butt. She punches out and catches the guy in the stomach landing her pistol on the side of his head when he bent over. She shoots him where she hit him before having to fire again at another guard. Neck shots were always the worst.  
The next four rooms she came across were empty save for a few people lagging around that she puts down easily, but the longer she wanders around without finding her crew puts her on edge. She is almost caught by surprise by a guard and barely moves out of the way of a shot, ducking back into the room she’d just left. She points her gun at the door and waits until she sees his leg around the corner, shoots him and sends him to the floor. She shoots him in the shoulder when she comes around the corner and rips his gun from his hands, smashes his face in and tosses it away.  
She’s nearing the end of a hallway when she encounters a locked door. It’s a good sign.  
“I think I’ve found them,” she says.  
There’s a moment of nothing but the echoing of gunshots before: “Go get them. Everyone’s almost dead out here. Newbie should be coming down soon.”  
Alba trusts Kai to know what he’s doing so she works on the lock. She kicks the lock in and has to stop herself from being distracted by the sight in front of her. Hoss and Trip are tied to chairs in the middle of the room and there’s blood. But she focuses first on firing at the guard near the door. She hears Hoss scream.  
She looks up just as the guy who was closest to her crewmates tugs his knife back out of Hoss’s thigh, a smile on his face. He doesn’t look scared as she aims her gun at him but his smile does falter when the gun clicks. She’s out of magazines that are easily reachable.  
She knows the guy. She’s seen him lurking around the city before and she knows now that she’s made a mistake in writing him off as just another dealer. But from the size of his outpost here it’s obvious that he has been casing them, getting to know the crew and watching their every move. Another try-hard up and comer who wants to knock Hoss off his throne and group of idiots blindly following him in the hopes of getting money, probably. She isn’t gonna let him take her family from her.  
The guy runs at her, and she tosses her pistol aside, grabbing for the knife in her bra, slicing him across the cheek as she dives out of the way. He kicks his foot out and sends her stumbling. She catches her footing in time to bury her knife in his side, but he sends his elbow out at her and hits her across the temple. Alba twists her knife as she tugs it back and kicks out at him. The knife in his hand, still coated in Hoss’s blood, slices across her arm and chest as he falls. She manages to get a knee on his forearm before he can swing again and raises her knife.  
His free hand grabs her wrist and she struggles against his hold for a minute.  
“It’s funny,” he says. “I expected the big one, not the little girl.”  
She’s not going to even acknowledge that and reaches around with her free hand to grab his knife and buries it into his neck with a smile.  
She leaves him bleeding out on the floor and stumbles over to her crew. Her head is pounding and the cut from the knife is bleeding steadily but she manages to cut the ropes tying Trip’s hands and not his skin, the same for Hoss.  
“Hey, pops, Trip, how’s it going?” She asks, earning an exhausted laugh from her boss.  
Hoss looks like shit, his thinning hair is matted to his skull and his moustache is drooping on his face. His shirt is cut open and he’s bleeding from at least three stab wounds (plus countless knife cuts) but he manages a tired smile and stretches his arms out in front of him before standing up. “About as well as any work meeting should.”  
“If that’s a business meeting, I’m putting in my two-week notice,” Trip says. His voice is over used and his favorite hoodie is tattered. He doesn’t look like he’s been stabbed but his jeans have been ripped open and his bullet wound re-opened. His skin is also littered with cuts but nothing to the extent of Hoss.  
“Everyone in working order?” Kai asks. She looks up when his voice echoes in the room and not just her ear and is relieved to see him walking in with nothing more than a few bruises, two teammates were enough to worry about. Newbie follows in behind him and now has a pistol.  
“As much as we can be,” Trip says, limping over to Kai who wraps an arm around his waist for support.  
Alba would have mentioned on any other job that he should probably be helping Hoss because he’s bigger than her, but she can tell Kai’s not going to be letting Trip out of his sight. She offers Hoss her arm, but he shakes his head.  
“Is the place dead?” he asks.  
Newbie nods his head and falls into step beside Hoss as they walk towards the nearest exit. “Kai and I cleared everyone out.”  
The five of them make it through the building without incident, stepping over bodies and stopping only so Trip and Hoss could collect a dropped weapon. Kai opens the door and Alba almost laughs at the amount of bodies lying around in the dirt. Kai turns Trip in the direction of the car, and they’re not ten feet outside when there’s a gunshot.  
Kai doubles over.  
“I thought you fucking said you cleared it out!” Hoss yells. The new kid is still looking for the direction the bullet came when Trip fires up at the roof and a body falls to the ground.  
“I didn’t see anyone-“  
“What did I say about leaving someone alive?” Alba asks. She joins Trip by Kai’s side. The bullet hit him in the side, not too far from his spine. She’s never seen him double over from a wound before. She rips her shirt from the earlier knife wound and presses the cloth against the bullet hole.  
“Don’t,” Newbie says.  
“Exactly,” Alba says. She lets Trip take over putting pressure on Kai’s wound and runs off to get the car, knowing that Kai probably wouldn’t make the walk up the hill.  
When she gets back with the car, Newbie and Trip load Kai into the backseat, Hoss gets into the front and the doors are barely closed before she’s taking off back to the helicopter.  
The helicopter ride is tense; she flies with more focus than she ever has. Her knuckles aching and blistering on the controls. She tries to keep the copter as steady as she can because every tilt jostles her passengers around. Hoss is in the seat next to her using his shirt to put pressure on the wound in his thigh, he had dropped the smile back at the warehouse. She can’t see Trip and Kai.  
The earpieces are still on. Every now and then she catches a ragged breath over the sound of the helicopter blades and she tightens her grip.  
She has to squint a few times from the pain in her head, the knocks to her skull have given her a mild concussion. She was the only one, other than Newbie, who isn’t trying to bleed out all over the floor of the helicopter. Newbie is silent.  
“How are you doing, Kai?” She asks.  
There’s another minute of silence. “Just peachy, bird. We almost there?”  
“Few more miles and we’ll have you stitched up and murdering people again in no time.” She pauses. “How’s Trip?”  
“Crying. Looks like a real idiot if you ask me,” Kai says. His breathing is labored and the words come slow. Teasing is always a good sign though and she laughs. She takes the next moment to radio in their landing time to the hospital.  
When she lands the helicopter on the pad on the roof of the hospital there’s already someone waiting. The same nurses and doctors that have always patched them up. Kai is carted away on a stretcher before she’s even out of the front, and she’s tugged away by a nurse before she can follow them. She’s out in twenty minutes.  
The thing about being shot in some major organs is that the survival can sometimes be hit or miss. Hoss is stitched up and back to work in a day. Trip is back on bed rest. But Kai. In and out of surgeries for the next day, trying to sew up organs and stop internal bleeding. She thinks it should be easy, a man who can take a bullet to the shoulder and keep punching should be able to fight through surgeries. He was weak and pale when they took him into emergency the first time and now every time she sees him he’s still too pale. Trip sits outside his hospital room rather than going inside. He says the guy on that bed looks too fragile to be Kai but she’s caught him napping next to his hospital bed twice already. Hoss buys the biggest arrangement of flowers and writes “Get better, asshole, we’ve got work to do” on it. He signs it with a heart.  
Alba spends most of her time visiting bothering the nurses and flirting her way into free snacks and candy in the gift shop. She’s got a new scar on her chest that gives her an excuse to pull her shirt down. Or she’s sitting on the hospital bed beside Kai and watching bad reality TV for hours, just because he hates it.  
He looks so dumb laid up in a bed with no face paint (she tells him that every day he’s there).  
And the day Kai gets to go home he pulls a pistol and shoots Newbie point-blank in the living room.  
Hoss makes him clean it up.

**Author's Note:**

> I left Newbie ambiguous partially because I based him off more than one person and partially because it makes the reader choose who they think it is themselves.  
> I will only tell you he's not Lil J.


End file.
